Pages

Monday, 26 September 2011

She's best known as Dobby from Peep Show on the telly, she's a story-telling, songwriting stand-up and she's coming to Nottingham this Saturday. Isy Suttie spoke to Nottingham Confidential ahead of her appearance this weekend at the Nottingham Comedy Festival.

I grew up in Matlock and we used to go to Nottingham quite a lot, that's where the best shops were really. Going to Nottingham was quite a big deal because it took like an hour and it was really exciting and we used to go and watch all the skateboarders in the Market Square and hang around with them because we thought they were really cool and stuff. I used to really want to be a skater boy and I went to Nottingham and bought the deck of a skateboard- the board bit, without wheels- and I never bought the wheels, I was just carrying around the deck on my shoulder around Matlock, trying to look cool but everyone thought I looked stupid, I'm sure. So I do know Nottingham quite well, I like the tram system, that wasn't around when I was younger, good place Nottingham. You always want what you haven't got so although Matlock is really beautiful it was also quite boring because there wasn't a cinema and there wasn't a lot going on then so it was so great to go somewhere where we could buy clothes and watch films.

I'd always written songs and they turned into funny songs when I was at school. I didn't know I would end up doing stand-up, I always wanted to write and act and when I graduated from acting school I started going to watch a lot of comedy because I lived near a comedy club and then I just thought I'd try it and I loved it. It's quite hard when you start because you have to gig five or six nights a week to learn anything, but I think it was the music more than anything else, the fact that I had these funny songs that got me into stand-up comedy, though I didn't do the songs at first, I didn't want to rely on the guitar so I made myself talk.

It's strange and nice and a massive compliment to be compared to Victoria Wood but I know virtually nothing of her work. She's obviously fantastic, but I was sort of avoiding her work when the comparisons started because I want to carve my own furrow as anyone does. The people who I loved when I was growing up were Chris Morris with The Day Today, Alan Partridge and I really loved an Australian sitcom called Let The Blood Run Free and Mr Bean when I was a kid, I loved the slapstick which isn't something that I do on stage at all but it's the sort of thing I find funny, the misunderstandings.

Confidentially, my secret for Nottingham Confidential is that when I was a kid I had like a bogey mountain under my bed which was made up of loads of bogeys that I just used to put under the bed and it developed its own eco-system, it was disgusting with all these insects running around in it that were translucent and then my mum hoovered it up. That's one hundred per cent true.

Isy Suttie will be appearing at Bunkers Hill in Nottingham on October 1st courtesy of Magners Funhouse Comedy and tickets are £7. You can read more about the Nottingham Comedy Festival in our earlier article There's Something Funny HAppening In NottingHAm